Rackspace Reviews

Pros

There is an unlimited amount of opportunity and earning potential if your mind is in the right place. Being a part of a company that really gets how to treat their employees helps to push you to want to do more. I love this place!

- awesome work environment
- great people here - truly Rackers being Rackers
- Lanham really leads by example - great guy!

Cons

Middle management sometimes doesn't "get it" when it comes to culture and helping keep Rackspace great. Hiring tends to come from the outside for management when it really should come from internal Rackers.

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure that managers being hired are the right kind of people first. The rest can be taught.

Pros

-Great advancement opportunities
-Relaxed environment
-Leadership open to new ideas, lets you run with your own idea
-Celebrates successes, owns up to failures
-Caring management/leadership

Cons

-Some longer tenured Rackers in higher positions that shouldn't be here.
-Goes through change too quick for some people
-Pay noticeably under market

Advice to Senior Management

-Purge leadership that doesn't get/buy into the Rackspace culture.
-Pay closer to market

Pros

I have great managers who recognize how much I do\give to Rackspace.
It's a friendly and super fun place to work which makes working my ass off a little more worth it.

Cons

Some of the managers I have had we're truly horrible managers, and I honestly don't understand how some of them have remained employed or worse yet how some have been promoted.

Advice to Senior Management

We have some people that are truly bad managers, and I understand trying to teach them to be better managers, but honestly it hard to teach someone character. Please remove bad managers from management roles. For me there is nothing more discouraging than working for someone who not only is bad at their job, but also doesn't care about me.

Pros

The Culture makes you look forward to coming to work

Cons

Fast Growth causes alot of change

Pros

They welcome new ideas from the bottom up. Managers sincerely care about you and your professional/personal growth.

Cons

Promotion interviews are biased and somewhat of a popularity contest.

Pros

Lanham is a cool guy.

Cons

Don't know where to start. Middle management mostly are consist of freaks. They dont care your career. There is not much you can do to improve yourself. If a person has 10 years experience but knows nothing he will get much more pay than you. Pays are bad and not fair. It can be worst experience you have.

Advice to Senior Management

Grow up and care your employees and be fair. There are lots of stupid in the company, be aware of them and treat fairly.

Pros

Family friendly and great PTO and benefits. Opportunity to advance and grow in your career.

Cons

No matching 401K. Boys club attitude.

Pros

Everyone here treat each other like friends and family, i don't see myself ever wanting to work anywhere else.

Cons

The pay is below market average, there is a lot of bad middle management to avoid.

Pros

Quite possibly the best place you'd ever want to work! That of course depends on the department you work in, for as great as I have had it with my team, I have heard some less than great things from members of other teams.

The culture is unmatched. You can't beat the Rackspace culture, and for the most part they live up to their core values. The Rackers are really what makes Rackspace a great place to work, and the CEO allows for that organic process to take place. On-site dodgeball tournaments, water slides, company parties, you name it.

Cons

There has been a lot of senior level management hired from outside of the company (Yahoo). These execs do not live by the Rackspace core values of treating everyone likes Friends & Family and providing Full Transparency & Disclosure. Recently a very good friend and probably one of the best Rackers to ever grace the premises was terminated for a first and very minor infraction - a decision made by this leadership team who does not know what it means to be a Racker.

If you work for Rackspace, you will love it. But take things with a grain of salt and don't ever take anything for granted.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a long hard look at your senior leaders and stop hiring from outside of the company. you are ruining the culture that defines Rackspace!

Pros

1. Awesome people. Seriously. There are some crazy smart people working here.
2. Cultural History. There is an extensive and well earned culture built around provided the best support in tech.
3. Options/Stock grants appears to be getting better than they were 2 or 3 years ago.

Mostly, though, it's the people. I loved the teams that I worked with.

Cons

1. Compensation. The grapevine is full of verifiable stories of techs (regardless of discipline) leaving the company and receiving 50-100% raises, large options/stock grants, large relocation packages, etc.
2. Ineffective middle management. Everyone has their stories.
3. Training is barely there to non-existent. What training that does exist isn't effectively managed.
4. Silos. There are a LOT of silos. Cloud, for example, is often seen as a 'black box' - and feels like a separate company. Each of the support organizations feels as if they are in direct competition with each other.
5. Less pride/ownership/whatever you want to call it in the work the support teams are doing, leading to mediocre solutions and rework as 'patchy' solutions fail later on.
6. Work-life balance can be horrifyingly out of whack.
7. Emphasis on "friends and family" can result in employees' real families feeling neglected.

Advice to Senior Management

First, continue to work on compensation packages. They HAVE gotten better over the past two years, but still are not quite where they need to be to be competing with Amazon, IBM and Google for RAX employees.
Second, re-examine hiring and promotion practices. The Technical Architect track is awesome in keeping great Rackers engaged and on the payroll, however, for every Racker 'saved' by the program, how many others leave to similar positions with other companies? Expand scope, or otherwise come up with a solution to keep the senior people with the company, and hopefully bring some of those lost, back.
Work-life balance can be -extremely- out of whack. It is not at all uncommon for senior technical resources to work 60-80 hour weeks due to on-call needs.